Snoop Snoop Song: A Conversation with Glenn Greenwald

[Catherina]

Conversation — July 17, 2013, 8:00 am

Snoop Snoop Song: A Conversation with Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald on the importance of privacy, the hypocrisy of Democrats, and how he almost lost the NSA leak

By Alex Mierjeski

Did Edward Snowden reach out to you directly, out of the blue?

He emailed me back in December of last year, anonymously, and said something along the lines of “I and a few other people have some things that you’d be interested in. The problem is we can only communicate with you by encrypted email, so do you have PGP encryption?” I answered him and said “I’ll do it in the next couple of days and then you can email me back.” And he emailed in a few days and said “Did you do it yet?” and I said, “No, I haven’t done it yet,” and then he sent me step-by-step instructions — encryption for idiots, basically.

...

Is it disheartening to see such a 180-degree turn from former supporters?

I remember I would go around in 2007 and 2008 giving speeches about the Bush Administration, and people would sometimes say to me, “Don’t you realize that once Democrats get into office they’re going to do these same things, and all your allies who are now cheering for you are going to support those policies?” And I would say, “I don’t believe that’s true” — like their dignity would not allow them to spend eight years shrieking about the horrors of these policies, only to turn around and support them because a Democrat was doing it. I turned out to be totally wrong.

...

But the thing that really focused me was seeing how courageous Snowden was. I mean, here’s this twenty-nine-year-old kid who has made a conscious choice to subject himself to a substantial risk of being in prison for the rest of his life, and yet he never evinced even a molecule of remorse or regret or fear. He was completely convinced and tranquil about the rightness of his choice. That kind of courage is contagious. It made me want to do justice to his sacrifice. And that meant being as adversarial as possible when it came to the U.S. government, and not letting my own fears restrain what I did.

Have you been surprised by the content of the material he released?

I have. I still haven’t gone through all of it, but even though I had been writing for the past four years about how the NSA was building this completely unaccountable and sprawling surveillance system, seeing the truth of it — the hardcore reality of it in their documents — was kind of shocking, I have to say. And I really believe that the most significant revelations are yet to come. I don’t want to keep previewing that — we’re going to take our time vetting it and reporting it and figuring it all out — but the stuff that has shocked me the most is the stuff we haven’t even written about.

...

If you talk to Snowden, what he’ll say is, “Look, I’m not trying to destroy the surveillance state.” If he were, he could’ve done so many things: he could have sold the documents for millions of dollars to China or Iran; he could have passed them on covertly; he could have dumped them all on the Internet. What he’s trying to do is enable a democratic debate, so that people know what the government and the private sector — their partners — are doing in erecting this massive surveillance state. So that they can decide whether or not this is the kind of society in which they want to live. And if they decide that yes, they do want their government monitoring everything they do and collecting dossiers on them in the name of security, then so be it. But you have to have an informed citizenry before you can have a real debate.

http://harpers.org/blog/2013/07/241527/

[chimpymustgo]

1. K& R from just the excerpts. Going to read the Harper's piece now. What a courageous man Snowden is.

[Catherina]

2. His courage boggles the mind. Thanks for reading the whole interview. It's really good. n/t

[chimpymustgo]

3. "...the most vicious and vehement attacks on my reporting have come from Democrats."

-edit-

But interestingly the most vicious and vehement attacks on my reporting have come from Democrats. Democrats and progressives are the ones who were my loudest cheerleaders when I was writing this stuff about the Bush Administration, and they’ve become the primary source of hostility and contempt now that I’m writing the same exact stuff about Obama.

-edit -

http://harpers.org/blog/2013/07/241527/


It's been astonishing to watch this here at DU and in the media. I really cannot wrap my head around it.

[Laelth]

4. "I turned out to be totally wrong."

Indeed, he did. The proof is all around us here on DU.

-Laelth

[hootinholler]

5. You bet it is.

It's so frustrating to see people whom you thought you knew what they stand for do a 180 on issues. It's not just the security apparatus that is included in that observation.

[SamKnause]

6. Greenwald & Snowden

Greenwald and Snowden have had my full support since day one.

I continue to support both of them 100%.

Whistleblowers and leakers are putting their lives on the line to save this country.

I for one, admire and appreciate the brave whistleblowers and leakers of the world.

Free Bradley Manning
Stop persecuting Julian Assange
Stop persecuting Wikileaks
Stop persecuting and pursuing Edward Snowden
Free all the whistleblowers who are imprisoned

[KoKo]

7. Two more snips from Greenwald from Harpers Article:

Alex Mierjeski It’s astounding, the predictability with which any given administration responds to these sorts of leaks.

Greenwald: It’s just a natural instinct for people in power to want to hide what they do, because secrecy is the lynchpin for abuse of power, and transparency is the antidote to it. This is not only a tenet of America’s founding, but of political theory in general, that that’s the only way power can be checked. And people in power don’t want to be checked.



Greenwald: The real measure of how free a society is isn’t how its good, obedient servants are treated; it’s how dissidents are treated. And if you go and do any kind of investigative journalism and talk to whistleblowers, or talk to people who are dissenting or are otherwise engaged in activism against the government, or journalists who do that, you find this incredibly disturbing, intense climate of fear. Nobody will talk unless they’re using very sophisticated encryption technologies.

[Luminous Animal]

8. K&R

[ProSense]

9. As they say

I have. I still haven’t gone through all of it, but even though I had been writing for the past four years about how the NSA was building this completely unaccountable and sprawling surveillance system, seeing the truth of it — the hardcore reality of it in their documents — was kind of shocking, I have to say. And I really believe that the most significant revelations are yet to come. I don’t want to keep previewing that — we’re going to take our time vetting it and reporting it and figuring it all out — but the stuff that has shocked me the most is the stuff we haven’t even written about.

...shit or get off the pot.

Carl Bernstein: Greenwald 'out of line' (updated)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023261520

[woo me with science]

10. K&R